A no-frills free site model is at www.britefutures.com www.barchart.com - the Advanced Commodities product - offers more functionality and history for US$20 p.m. They also provide Time, Price and Size stats for traded spreads There is an example of their spread charts at the 'Sample Site', plus one posted. FutureSource also used to offer spread charting capability with their free 'premium' chart product. Putting myself in your shoes, I'd be looking to reconcile the wishlists in this thread with the objective and target market for your site. It appears that volume at price is your USP, and I wonder how relevant this is to many ED traders, who are primarily spreaders. Also, how meaningful is volume-at-price in a market which contains significant hedging activity.
Tough call on what charts to offer for Euros. I would say it would probably be sufficient to do the first four outrights and the first three spreads....possibly even that is overkill for people that don't really follow euros. No need to get into the reds.
Yet, a cursory glance at Globex volumes on randomly selected dates recently shows the first Red as the most active, also with the highest ratio of trading volume to open interest.
Yeah, but think about it? Z7 (the first red) is a bet on the libor 90 day in dec 2007...nobody knows or really cares what thats gonna be a year prior. The prices of the whites are significant. The volume in the reds has less to do w/ the price and more to do w/ them being a hedge vs. stuff farther up the curve. Check out the volume in the Z6Z7 or Z6U7 recently, as well, whats not there is probably from paper legging them. Basically saying...think about it...if people are trading Z7, the price matters less than the spread between something else....so why bother charting that outright? The prices of the whites/their spreads would be the only thing useful to a retail person visiting that site.
Would there be anyway to code your charts so that the user could query what chart they want? Something that's always been a problem for me (and anyone else chime in if they have a better idea) is charting pack spreads over time. What I do now is when purchased add the 4 contracts up and divide by 4 for the blended price of the pack then do it for the 2 leg and ubtract for the price of the spread. It would be nice to see historicaly where these have moved over time with out all the work. I could see you getting TONS of hits on your site if people could query charts on spreads especialy pack and bundle spreads. Then guys on the floor could passively watch customers trades and look over time where they are headed and call them and let them know. For instance if I ahve a customer buy a green/gold spread today and he's still holding it when it is effectively becomes a red/blue spread it would be helpful to see the chart of how that moved.
Stack; Thanks for the suggestion. After hearing all the great responses, I am currently working on adding a "Chart Options" section that has a drop down menu for traders to be able to select any EuroDollar contract for two years out. Could you give me a little more detail on what you would like to see for spreads? It sounds like to me, if I took the 4 most current contracts for the EuroDollar and summed the price action and volume that would help for spread trading? Or would it be a good idea to sum the 4 most current contracts and compare on the same axis the next 4 contracts? I look forward to your input. I want to have useful info for traders that give a concise view of the dynamics of the price action.
I think that is part of of the problem with euro's is that what might be completely popular for one set of traders is useless to the next. Having so many contracts with so many intracate spread combinations makes it tuff to single out what is "important".
It took a little bit of time, but here is the link where you can see volume at price for the Eurodollar in the chart-ex platform; http://cme.chart-ex.com/showVolumeCharts.do?group=interestRates&symbol=mED&monthAndYear=4407817 Use the drop down menu to select your month. In the near future I am going to being offering intraday charts. I look forward to your input.
do you have any realtionship with the merc? is there a link on cme.com that points to your site or did you just copy cme.com?